Don't Fear the Future - Fear those that may wield it.

The future is a wonderful and exciting thing - we may cure aging, cure cancer, AIDS, and even death within the next century. Computing hardware is advancing incredibly rapidly and has scaled down to the microscopic level - and we now have hoverboards. We can send cars to space on a literal whim and we can store the contents of every book ever written on a device no bigger than a thumbnail.
Looking at it all it can be amazing....and kind of scary. Who knows what other breakthroughs we have made that we do not know about or understand?
Viral creations that could wipe out entire countries; potential energy sources that could wipe out the entire planet or even create a miniature black hole (which would slowly rip the planet to pieces) - which, on its own, would make a great story... The Hole.
Sadly, doing some research shows that it would destroy the world in just 15 minutes.
15 minutes, and that is not discounting the explosive nature of the build up of matter around the balck hole (essentially the matter would all try to squeeze into the hole at one, compact itself and heat up explonentially, emitting gamma and x radiation). The point is that when we turned on the CERN particle accelerator, there was a risk of that happening. But we did it anyway.
When we dropped the first atomic bomb, there was a risk of that setting every particle in the sky on fire - but we did it anyway. One day, and one day soon, our luck could run out.
But it is not just that that we need to worry about - technology is getting incredibly advanced very quickly and it can, at times, get very dangerous. Many people are worried about it falling into the hands of evil dictators and corporate overlords, but imagine what would happen when it fell into the hands of the average every day working man? You know, the type that gets absolutely hammered every weekend, beats his wife  and crashes his car? That sort of working Joe?
We have a population that we cannot trust to poison themselves to death with household chemicals, that we barely trust to drive a car (and whose inept driving of said car leads to thousands of deaths each day) and we will be putting increasingly complex and dangerous tools in their hands. If we let that sort of tech get out, we are doomed.
But if we let just the top 1% control that technology - whether it be handheld devices, body augmentation or even genetic manipulation - aren't we just as doomed? There are three answers here, none of them good - let no one have it; ban the tech, let only a choice few have it (inevitably the 1%) or let everyone have it. Let that sink in for a minute - these are, mathematically, the only options available as they are right now.

There may be other ways that we can deal with the potentially catastrophic future tech that is rapidly becoming a reality, however - Guardians. We could, potentially, design Artifical Intelligence Guardians designed with our best interests in mind - ones that can, essentially, baby sit us until we become a self-reliant species that can be trusted to not destroy itself. Of course, this opens a whole new pit of potential and existential terror. We would have to give over our independence to an artificial construct that could, if it glitches or if the programming is wrong, get it horribly wrong.
We could also do this subtly, without telling anyone, slowly placing a guardian AI into each and every home - in the form of a handheld device. Imagine a phone that would watch over you - that would stop you from making terrible mistakes, either online or in the real world.
Imagine if it could tell you were to drunk or emotional to text your ex, imagine if it knew that you could not afford to buy that new expensive dress and would lock down your bank account, imagine if it knew how to stop you from making mistakes before you made them. But not just as a jailor, but also as a guide - it could actively go out looking for a better job for you; show you adverts for things that you might not only like but would also be useful to you in future.
And so I have swung rapidly from world destroying black holes to artifical Compa9 machines that would watch our every move and gently guide us like benevolent guardians.

The future is unknown, and it can be terrifying....but it can also be so amazing and full of potential. We need to test the waters and see what we might run into before we do - we need a guide, we need to know what to be scared of and what to embrace before it reaches us.